Of the three films John Hughes wrote in 1983, Mr. Mom proved that he could write a big, Zeitgeisty hit, but his next effort (which premiered a whole week later in July of that year) was almost certainly the more impressive achievement. For one thing, it was almost as successful as Mr. Mom – $61 […]

If I happened to be teaching a class in screenwriting, I’d be overjoyed to have Crazy, Stupid, Love. as a case study: it’s the best and most frustrating kind of good-but-not-great movie, in which the specific, singular script flaw that holds it back is absurdly obvious and easy to fix, but so profound in its […]

Errol Morris made his name as a documentarian on a run of captivating films about remarkably weird human beings: Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, and the like. But after the success of his mesmerising television series First Person in the early years of the ’00s, he did as so many liberal filmmakers did in the […]

I’m not sure that I’ve ever specifically liked Jennifer Aniston in anything: she has a pleasant enough demeanor, true, and she’s quite attractive, and there’s a prickly-soft thing she has going on that makes her a solid foil for just about every actor she’s been stacked against in any movie, and she has machine-precise comic […]

Being a concerned friend, when Mark Kreutzer donated to the Carry On Campaign, it was with the express intent of filling a terrible gap in my 1980s romantic-comedy education. To which I can only say that I now owe him a debt of gratitude; for quite a gap it was, and glad I am to […]

Whatever single adjective describes Short Sharp Shock, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, it is assuredly not “frothy” – and yet here we are, with director Fatih Akin making himself a breezy farce about restaurant management and the joy of food, Soul Kitchen, and it is simultaneously a great deal frothier than any of those […]

A Hard Day’s Night being one of the most profitable movies of the 1960s, it was a matter of necessity that there was going to be a second Beatles feature. It’s to the band’s credit that it was no mere retread, though a retread might have ended up making a bit more sense than Help!, […]

A recurring theme in our year-long review of the cinema culture of 1939 has been the awareness of filmmakers in those days of the coming war, almost like people in that year could predict the coming change in the whole structure of the western world that would result. In the English-language movies we’ve looked at […]

Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s Country Wedding has a remarkably avant-garde central concept that makes for a great nugget of trivia, and as it turns out, only a modestly entertaining finished project: at the start of shooting her film, she rehearsed the characters and their history and their relationships, had each of the cast members think of one […]

I’d dearly love to spring out with the ol’ contrarianism and declare Burn After Reading to be a better film than No Country for Old Men, but I really don’t believe I can defend that argument. So instead, let me just stick to the easy praise: Burn After Reading is easily the funniest film by […]

The party line on Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is that it is a period film done up in the style of the French New Wave, which is a little bit accurate and a whole lot reductive. It’s an easy point to forget that there were many styles of filmmaking in […]

It’s a bit of a pity that Frances McDormand’s first performance in two years (and the first time she appears to be enjoying herself in much longer) is doomed to be lost in the shadow of Amy Adams’s attempt to prove she’s not a one-hit wonder. This is after all a perilous moment for Adams: […]